The dark side of Apple: one man's monologue of misery

Asher Moses

His gripping monologue has made Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak cry and forced the company's new chief executive into a strident defence of Apple's supply chain, but now Mike Daisey has a message for Australian Apple fans: open your eyes.

For the past 15 months or so Daisey been touring the world stunning audiences with his two-hour tale of the appalling conditions and underage labour that goes into making our iPhones, iPods and iPads. The show, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (review), has been running since Saturday at the Sydney Opera House and is due to conclude on Sunday.

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The Agony and the Ecstacy of Steve Jobs

American monologist Mike Daisey spells out his concerns over the production of Apple products in a one-man show at The Sydney Opera House.

Daisey has been performing monologues for 15 years on topics ranging from 9/11 to Nikola Tesla to Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard. Earlier this month he presented a 24-hour epic, dubbed All the Hours in the Day.

In his latest outing Daisey tells the story of his own personal religious devotion to Apple's products - "I have been to the House of Steve Jobs. I have walked the stations of his cross," Daisey says in his show - and the journey of the man responsible for them, Apple founder Steve Jobs.

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But the audience is soon whacked across the head with a confronting tale of Daisey's trip to the heart of world electronics manufacturing, Shenzhen, where more than half of the world's electronic goods are made.

He interviewed scores of workers and toured the factories while posing as a US businessman and was shocked to learn that people were literally being worked to death to meet Western gadget lust. From long hours to inhumane and robotic working and living conditions to suicide and child labour, Daisey saw things that switched off his innate desire to always have the latest piece of kit.

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"I thought about how they were designed a lot ... I thought about what they were like once they arrived in users' hands and what they were like to take apart but I never [previously] thought of the moment in between, the moment of creation," he said.

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Daisey said that the general public had become so cut off from the means of production that we were largely ignorant to the fact that the factories that make our gadgets are installing nets around their buildings to catch suicidal workers.

Focus ... a Foxconn staff member works on the production line at the company complex near Shenzhen. Right, Ma Zishan carries a picture of his dead son. Photo: AP/Reuters

The lie we tell ourselves

People who did know about the conditions in which their gadgets were made had "grown to accept the situation" and engaged in a "sort of denialism", telling themselves things like this is the way it's always been in China.

He says that the idea that such poor working conditions are necessary to keep the prices of our gadgets down is a fallacy, as labour costs make up only a tiny percentage of the cost of an iPhone and much could be fixed simply by treating the factory workers like human beings as opposed to machines.

"We've consigned these people to a particular kind of hell and it doesn't need to be that bad. It doesn't need to be so terrible that it actually kills people," he said.

Mike Daisey ... ‘‘We’ve consigned these people to a particular kind of hell and it doesn’t need to be that bad. It doesn’t need to be so terrible that it actually kills people.’’

Fanboy rage

Daisey reserves particular disdain for the Apple fanboys who accuse him of singling out Apple when the rest of the technology industry is just as guilty, and of ignoring the fact that the suicide rate at the Foxconn factories is lower than the reported official average in China.

"These Apple fanboys have the most amazing moral and ethical equivalency that I've seen," said Daisey.

"All they would have to do is raise the blinders just a little bit and see with human eyes and they could be an enormous force for actually getting real change to happen. So when they choose instead to remain children playing with toys it's infantilism of the highest order."

He said the official suicide rate figures released by the Chinese government cannot be relied upon and that if there was a spate of suicides at a Western factory - as occurred at Foxconn recently - there would be a mammoth public outcry.

"It's an unbelievably pathetic defence to say my company's responsible for atrocities but so are other companies," he said, adding Apple should lead the industry into a more ethical approach.

"Apple has long prided itself on being a leader, it speaks constantly about being a leader in the field, they're very proud of that and they take huge advantage of it in their PR. Well, this is what comes with being a leader ... suck it up and start acting like one."

I will never be the same: Wozniak

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who created the company's first computers with Jobs but has since stepped back from day-to-day involvement, saw Daisey's show and said "I will never be the same after seeing that show". The pair even had dinner together.

"The shocking things that Mike said which brought me to tears were so because they came as a first-person story," Wozniak told The New York times. "Mike was living the pain of what he was describing as he told it."

Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked by an investor in February whether he had seen the show and joked that if it didn't run on ESPN or CNBC, he hadn't seen it. He then launched into a defence of Apple's supply chain and said Apple was doing the "heavy lifting" in the industry to improve worker conditions.

In response Daisey said "I imagine that means he would need to have stories on ESPN and CNBC about his own workers before he will actually acknowledge what he's doing to them".

He said Jobs and Cook and other senior executives "know exactly how the sausage gets made" but many Apple employees do not. He said over 100 Apple staffers had spoken to him about the show and many were surprised.

"I talked to people who are on the design team ... they design prototypes, send schematics to Shenzhen, prototypes get couriered back - it's not like they go over and see the manufacturing line," he said.

'I've put a virus in your head'

At the end of his show Daisey tells the audience "I have put a virus in your head". Is this a call to action? Daisey says whether people choose to act on the information he presents is up to them.

"What is meant by the virus is very straightforward. You have seen this performance, you will never forget it, it will live in your mind ... so you can no longer claim that you are actually ignorant," he said.

Daisey admires what Jobs has done to revolutionise computing - from introducing the graphical user interface to pioneering touch-based technology - but believes he "sold out many of his ideals like many of the baby boomer generation".

Apple had gone from being a pirate of Silicon Valley to a tyrant that was "hell bent on locking its users into an extremely rigid system".

Daisey said he had kept all of the Apple products he owned before he started his journey to discover how they were made, but has not upgraded any of his gear since.

"It's actually been a huge relief," he said, remarking about how he used to hang out for every new piece of Apple gear even if he didn't need it.

"[Technology] gives you pleasure but it's a very almost childish sort of pleasure and it's really actually very humanising to actually start to view these things as tools and tools alone.

"I have not been upgrading my hammer every year or other things in my house and it's kind of a relief to let my technology become a tool that I am a master of and not vice-versa."